The Message and the Messenger, Part 1

This past Sunday I sat in the pew at my local church and listened to my pastor preach on the first chapter of 1 Thessalonians. His text included a phrase from verse 5 that I have read many times without considering it: “You know what kind of men we proved to be among you for your sake.” Partway through the sermon, my pastor asked the congregation’s permission to step away from his outline. “Let me just be your pastor for a minute,” he said. What followed was a short pastoral caution about the many voices we listen to online, and it contained a sentence I found myself thinking about for the rest of the service.

“The less access we have to someone’s character, the more cautious we should be about giving them sweeping authority over our lives.”

I heard that sentence first as a member of a congregation, nodding along. A moment later I was processing it again as someone who writes and records videos for thousands of people I will never meet. That processing made me a bit less comfortable than the first hearing.

Let me put some numbers to that discomfort, since numbers are how I tend to think. I have been writing this Natural Historian blog for almost 15 years, and the blog has about 3,500 followers and published over 600 articles. My YouTube channel is just over four years old, has about 5,500 subscribers, 450 videos published and just under 750,000 views. Of all those people, I have met in person or know well perhaps 200 at most.

Among the blog’s followers, that works out to about one in eighteen. That sounds respectable until you notice that it assumes every person I know personally also follows the blog, which is surely not the case. The video audience is where the ratio becomes more sobering. Three quarters of a million views does not mean three quarters of a million people, so let me be conservative. If the average viewer had watched twenty-five of my videos (an overestimate, I am sure), those views would still represent about 30,000 different people. Two hundred out of 30,000 is one in over a hundred.

A more realistic assumption, one that accounts for the many viewers who watch a single video and move on, pushes that ratio to one in several hundred, and quite possibly one in a thousand or more. Put plainly, for at least ninety-nine of every hundred people who encounter my work, everything they know about me comes from what I have chosen to show them.

Compare that with the church Paul was writing to. Luke tells us that Paul reasoned in the synagogue at Thessalonica on “three Sabbath days” (Acts 17:2) before opposition drove him out of the city. Paul’s remark that the Philippians sent him help “once and again” while he was there (Phil. 4:16) suggests the stay ran longer than three weeks, perhaps a few months. That is still a short time.

Yet in those weeks the Thessalonians watched Paul and his companions work “night and day” so as not to be a burden to anyone (1 Thess. 2:9). They received from them “not only the gospel of God but also our own selves” (2:8). A few months of life lived among them gave that young church a kind of knowledge about Paul that more than a decade of my archive cannot give anyone about me.

My pastor gave me a way to think about that gap. In what follows I want to lay out his principle. Then, before I apply it to anyone else in two additional posts to come (Parts II and III), I want to apply it to myself.

A Segment of a Sermon in Brief

Midway through his sermon, my pastor borrowed his central image from Jimmy Dodd’s book Survive or Thrive: 6 Relationships Every Pastor Needs. Picture a theater. The front stage is well lit, carefully decorated, and faces an audience. The backstage is another world entirely, cluttered and chaotic and hidden behind a curtain.

Leaders have both, Dodd argues. The front stage is the sermon, the polished three-point outline, the well-crafted liturgy. The backstage, in my pastor’s words, “is the marriage. It’s the family. It’s the private conversations. It’s the responding to criticism, the handling of conflict. The backstage is where the lights are off and no one is applauding.”

The danger lies in giftedness. My pastor was quick to say that gifted preachers are a blessing to the church. “But sometimes a person can become so gifted on the front stage that people become willing to overlook what is happening behind the curtain.” The Thessalonians had something better than a polished performance. They had a backstage pass, and what they saw behind the curtain matched what they heard from the front.

That is what prompted the digression and I will digress even more when I follow up this post with two more (an application to parachurch organizations and an application to use of artificial intelligence). We live, my pastor noted, in an extraordinary moment, when some of the most gifted teachers in history are a few clicks away. He is grateful for them and benefits from them himself. But distance comes at a price: “we might know what kind of preacher they are, but we don’t know what kind of person they are.” Hence his principle, which he stated twice. The second time he added one word: “the less access we have to someone’s character, the more cautious we should be about them gaining sweeping spiritual authority over our lives.”

The sentence bears us breaking it down a bit. Access means proximity to a person’s life, which differs from information about their work. I can know a great deal about a distant teacher’s preaching while knowing nothing about how he treats his wife. Character is the backstage. Being cautious about a teacher does not mean refusing to hear him.

And the qualifier sweeping matters most of all, because it scales the caution to how much authority is being handed over. Learning a fact from someone is one thing. Letting that person tell you which churches are faithful is quite another.

My pastor grounded all of this in two passages, and I have come to think the pairing is the most useful part of the sermon. Acts 17:11 commends the Bereans, who received Paul’s message eagerly and then examined “the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.” That is a test of the message, and it works at any distance.

Hebrews 13:7 asks for something more: “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.” That is a test of the messenger, and it requires access. As my pastor put it, “It is very hard to imitate someone if you don’t know them.” God, he said, “cares about the message and he cares about the messenger.”

The internet has made the first test easier than at any point in history. It has made the second nearly impossible. I’ve written about my concerns about pastors and social media use in the past making some similar points. A Plea to Pastors and Theologians who Preach on Social Media

My pastor also guarded both flanks of his principle, and I want to preserve his guardrails because some readers will be listening for them. He did not tell us to listen only to local pastors. “That’s terrible advice,” he said. “We wouldn’t be reading from the Bible if that were the case.” Nor did he claim that pastors should hold “some type of authority where we are authoritative over you and you have to do everything we’re saying.” His point was discernment, and discernment applies in every direction.

Putting Myself on the Grid

It helps me to picture my pastor’s principle as a simple grid. One axis is access: how much of someone’s life you can actually see. The other is the scope of authority you grant them, running from a narrow claim at one end to how you live and whom you trust at the other.

	Narrow authority (a claim, a lesson, a tip)	Sweeping authority (how to live, which churches to trust)
High access	A friend recommends a book. A colleague corrects your data. Healthy and ordinary.	Elders who “keep watch over your souls” (Heb. 13:17). Appropriate, and accountable to a church court.
Low access	A distant teacher whose specific claims you test. Healthy if you act like a Berean. Most of my followers can be found here.	The danger zone. A distant voice telling you which churches are compromised, what a faithful Christian must believe about the age of the earth, whom to distrust.

Three of the four boxes describe ordinary, healthy relationships. A friend who recommends a book has high access and narrow authority. The elders of a church, who “keep watch over your souls” (Heb. 13:17), have high access and broad authority, and they answer to the church for how they use it. A distant teacher whose specific claims you check has low access and narrow authority, which is the relationship the Bereans modeled.

The fourth box is the one my pastor warned about. Low access joined to sweeping authority is the danger zone, whatever the character of the person who happens to sit in it.

For nearly everyone who reads this blog, I sit in the low-access row. The numbers above settle that much. Which column I occupy is another matter. It depends partly on what I ask of readers to accept and what authority readers decide to grant to me.

I should add that the internet is very good at making the low-access row feel like the high-access row. Sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl noticed this as early as 1956, when they described the bond audiences form with radio and television personalities as “intimacy at a distance.” When I post a photograph from a field trip or talk to the camera from my own office, it can feel to a viewer like a glimpse behind the curtain. It is still the front stage. I chose the photograph, I chose the angle, and I chose not to show you the parts of the day that went poorly.

Five Questions to Ask of Any Online Teacher, Starting With Me

If I cannot offer readers a backstage pass, what can I offer? I have tried to boil the answer down to five questions that anyone can ask of any distant voice, whether a preacher, a podcaster, a ministry, or a biology professor with a blog. I will answer the first four here and give the fifth its own section.

Who could correct me? If no one can tell a teacher he is wrong, be extra careful with what he teaches. I am a conservative Christian and a member of a local church. I sit under the preaching of a pastor who knows me, and I am accountable to the elders of that church. My scientific work passes through colleagues and peer reviewers before it reaches print.

Those are real forms of accountability, and I am grateful for them. I also have to admit their limits. None of those people read a blog post or watch a video before I publish it. Whatever correction they offer comes after the fact, and largely because some of them happen to read what I write.

When have I said “I was wrong”? A voice that never corrects itself is either always right or never checked, and I am quite sure I am not always right. Readers should expect corrections from anyone who writes as much as I do. A long record without a single one should raise their suspicion.  Followers of my blog and videos are likely aware that there have been times I have revisited material because I reported incorrect information or realized that I misunderstood someone I was critiquing. 

How do I treat people who disagree with me? Dodd places the handling of criticism and conflict squarely in the backstage, and he is right to. Most of an audience never sees how a socially distant teacher behaves when he is challenged. The comment section of a YouTube video or a Facebook page is one of the few places where a little of that backstage shows through. Even there, a teacher can choose how much of his true self to reveal.

Over the years I have tried to give credit where it is due on the other side of this debate, to scientists such as Todd Wood and Kurt Wise, who report what they find in the data even when it is uncomfortable for their position. I have also tried to correct critics of young-earth creationism when they misrepresent what young-earth creationists actually believe.

I have not always passed this test. When I join the live chat of a YouTube livestream, most often on the Standing for Truth channel, I have at times been more dismissive than I would want any reader to be with me. The pace of a live chat makes it easy to type the clever reply instead of the charitable one. That is my backstage showing, and I am working on it.

Can you check my sources? This is the Berean question, and it is where a distant teacher can offer the most. When I write that an Answers in Genesis article makes a claim, I link the article. When I cite a scientific paper, I name it so you can find it. My hope is that a reader can follow every factual claim I make back to where it came from and judge whether I represented it fairly. Ok, sometimes I do forget and this is a reminder to myself that I need to better at leading you to my sources.

Claims, it turns out, have a front stage and a backstage too. On one side is the confident headline or the museum sign. On the other is the data table, the methods, and the caveats tucked into the discussion section. I will have more to say about that next time. For now the point is simple: you may never get access to my character, but you can almost always get access to my evidence.

The Fifth Question: What Am I Asking You to Do?

The first four questions may help you judge how much trust a teacher has earned including myself. The fifth asks how much authority the teacher is claiming. In light of my pastor’s principle, it is the question that matters most.

So let me be plain about what I am asking. I am asking you to weigh evidence. I would like you to read the papers I cite, look at the rocks and fossils I photograph, and decide whether my arguments hold up. That is a narrow request, and I think it sits comfortably in the Berean box of the grid.

I am not asking for authority over where you worship. I am not asking you to judge whether your pastor is faithful by what he believes about the age of the earth. And I am not asking you to treat any view of the days of Genesis, mine included, as the mark of a faithful Christian.

If you belong to a church that teaches young-earth creationism, my counsel is simple. Under most circumstances, stay and love your congregation. Take your questions respectfully to your elders, who know you and whom you know. Your pastor has a backstage pass to your life that I will never have, and you have one to his.

Paul gave the Corinthians the right way to think about every teacher they were tempted to rally behind: “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each” (1 Cor. 3:5). James adds a sober warning for those of us who teach. We “will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1). Together those verses describe the posture I want. A teacher is a servant, and a servant who speaks to many people should expect more scrutiny than most.

A reader who knows my work will see an objection coming. I spend a great deal of time critiquing Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, who are distant voices to nearly all of their audience, and I do it as a distant voice myself. Is that a double standard?

I think the answer lies in my pastor’s word sweeping. He was grateful for distant voices, and so am I. They may always speak, and we may always learn from them. What deserves scrutiny is the authority a distant voice claims over congregations it does not shepherd. That is the subject of my next post, where I will put these same five questions to the parachurch ministries that have shaped how so many of our churches read Genesis. It seemed only right to answer them about myself first.

Who Has the Backstage Pass?

Near the end of that part of his sermon, my pastor asked a question I keep returning to: “What do the people who know me best know about the kind of person I really am?” For me, those people are my family, my pastor and the elders of my church, my students, and my colleagues. They have seen me tired, impatient, and wrong. If you want to know what kind of man I am, they are the ones who could tell you, and I would want you to trust their answer over anything I could say about myself on a blog.

So let me turn the question around. Who has the backstage pass to the voices you listen to most? Who could correct them, and do they welcome it? When did they last say they were wrong? How do they treat the people who disagree with them? Can you check their sources? What are they asking you to do? And would your elders recognize their names?

My pastor said the gospel “should be closing the gap between the person that people see and the person we actually are.” I can pray that for myself as someone with a public platform. I hope you will pray it for every teacher you trust, near or far.

Next time I will put the same questions to the distant voices that have done the most to shape how many evangelical churches read Genesis. Until then, test what I say against the evidence and against Scripture, the way the Bereans did, and keep your trust anchored in the people who actually know you.

Blessings,

Joel